Dr. Donna Walker Tileston has served education as a leader in teaching, administration, research, writing, software development, and national consulting for the past thirty years. Her administrative responsibilities have included curriculum development, management, technology, finance, grants management, public relations, and drug abuse prevention programs. For the past fifteen years Dr. Tileston has been actively involved in brain research and the factors that inhibit learning or increase the brain’s ability to put information into long-term memory.  Donna is a member of Corwin’s Million Dollar Author’s Club, which means her books have sold more than 1 million dollar’s worth.

Dr. Tileston’s vast research has been published through Corwin Press under the titles Strategies for Teaching Differently (1998) and Ten Best Teaching Practices: How Brain Research, Learning Styles and Standards Define Teaching Competencies (2000, 2005) which has been on Corwin’s Best Seller List since it’s first publication.

This research, along with comprehensive research on teaching and learning, brain research, and research on the urban learner led Dr. Tileston to develop a program designed to recruit and retain new teachers titled What Every Teacher Should Know (2003) (see below for description). This series was the recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award for Excellence in Educational Publishing by the American Educational Publishers Association and is on Corwin’s bestseller list.  Written in the spirit of the No Child Left Behind Act, the program offers Master’s level credit toward a teaching degree or teacher certification and alternative certification at California State University-Bakersfield and is offered in two formats: a comprehensive online course and in book format through Corwin Press. What Every Teacher Should Know currently consists of the following ten books: 

1. Working with Today’s Diverse Learners—research-based approaches to working with diverse learners

2. Motivation That Develops Self-Directed Learners—steps teachers can take to motivate and challenge students

3. How Learning Occurs—a holistic approach to student learning

4. Instructional Planning That Develops Self-Directed Learners—long- and short-term goals for lesson planning

5. Teaching Practices That Are Best for Student Learning—a bag of teaching tools for the written, taught, and assessed curriculum

6. Classroom Management and Discipline—effective tools to minimize or prevent the most common discipline problems

7. Student Assessment—and the implications of standards-based instruction in the classroom

8. Working With Special Learners—effective tools to help students with special needs achieve school success

9. Using Media and Technology to Add Value to Learning—media that work for each of the student modalities

10. The Profession and Politics of Teaching—effective partnerships with parents, teaching peers, mentor teachers, administrators, and teacher organizations

 In 2004, the training manual for this best-selling series was published by Corwin and a new book, What Every Parent Should Know About Their Child’s School and High Stakes Tests was published in October, 2005.

Dr. Tileston has published her research in many prominent education publications including Texas Study (November 1997), the TASCD newsletter (April 1998), the National Association of Secondary School Principals (November 1998, in monograph form), and in the Virginia Journal of Education (October 2003). To date Donna has made over 500 presentations on her research at state, national and local meetings. In January 2004, Dr. Tileston was chosen to speak for three days at the Southern Regional Education Board’s Winter Conference regarding the theme “High Schools That Work.” The purpose of the conference was to find solutions to education problems that have been identified by board representatives from sixteen states, including Texas. Over 25 percent of the attendees signed up for Dr. Tileston’s sessions titled Toolkit for Instructional Strategies That Work.

Dr. Tileston spoke to representatives from 123 countries at The Hague, Netherlands in November, 2005 and to Eastern European educators in Warsaw in March, 2006.